>The Day My Stepdaughter Joined the Mommy Wars
>”So we played this game today in group time,” my 16-year-old said, “where the teacher read out statements and we had to name the person in the group who best fit the statement. And guess which two statements everyone said fit me?”
“I don’t know, what?”
“I will be a stay-at-home mom‘ and ‘I am very nurturing!” She grimaced.
“Um. Wow!” I said.
“And afterward, the teacher asked if we disagreed with the statements about ourselves and I raised my hand. Because I could never be a stay-at-home mom! I mean, I can’t cook and I hate to clean and I need to have a career!”
“Did you tell the teacher that?”
“Yes!”
“And what did she say?”
“She just looked at me and then she said, ‘Interesting.”
Funny. That was exactly what I was going to say.
>Poor thing! LOL It really sucks when your peers think a certain way about you and you think something completely different.
>I was like that about becoming a teacher because my mother was one and I constantly heard, “Are you going to be an English teacher, just like your MOM?” Sadly, I have some talent in this area and I probably SHOULD have pursued it as a career. Time to sit down stepdaughter and explain to her that what we do IS a career. We just don’t get paid! HA!
>Right, because I’m known for how often I clean and cook, aren’t you? (Or maybe you are, I often say I’m gunning for the laziest SAHM award)
>Oh there are SO many ways to interept that. As a working mom, I immediately thought—oh just cause you are nurturing, you have to stay home”. But on the flip side, SAHMs dont have a career—thats crap too! All in all, this working out of the house mom thinks that the mommy wars are crap all over the place—for both the SAHM and the WOHM.
>Those teenage years are tough. Lots of kids (myself included) don’t let others “see” them as they really are. I wasn’t able to let the real “me” shine through until I was in college.
>Oh cooking and cleaning, how I love thee! Why, I need from the time I was a child that my deep love of scrubbing toilets and emptying drier vents meant that I had a calling to be a stay-at-home mom. I must go now – my pie is done.
>You mean to tell me cooking and cleaning are part of the job? Hell, why didn’t someone tell me that before I signed on.
>Interesting is only half of it….
>I love your daughter’s comment! I felt just the same way at her age, and again at 25, actually, and then I married a man who can cook, I hired a maid to clean (once a month), and I had a wonderful, fantastic, power-filled career. And then I had a baby. And I fell head over in heels in love with him and couldn’t imagine being without him for a single minute. And I gave myself permission to be that person AND a SAHM for a little while. Life’s a carousel, kids, and we can step on and off the career track and the SAHM track as fits each of us. Hooray for that — and HOORAY for strong-willed, well-spoken daughters!
>When I was a senior in high school a good guy friend nominated me to be most likely to have 8 children for our senior superlatives. I was incensed and stopped speaking to him for a while because I thought he was insinuating that I was fat and matronly (I was soo mature). I also began to wear a lot of black and smoke Marlboro reds in an attempt to change my image. Until I graduated from college I insisted that I didn’t really like children.Well I’m halfway to eight, and my guy pal had the last laugh! If my husband didn’t have good sense I’d probably have eight.In high school this sounds like such a frumpy,dull life..I can’t really blame her!
>It’s a good thing she’s nurturing, actually. This will serve her well in just about any high-states go-get-em career she enters, right? After all, the vast majority of execs out there are very high maintenance. Unlike, you know, being the CEO-CFO-CIO-EventPlanner-TravelAgent-Professor of a mere household.
>I had lots of folks tell me that I would make a really great mom and I didn’t want anything to do with it…but funny thing was I had no idea what it was I DID want to be. Until I became a mom.
>At her age I didnt want children either. I now have 4 lol.I also have a career but all my kids are older and off to school and my huband said thats no reason to have another baby….darn
>Hey it could be worse. They could have told her she wasn’t nurturing and that they couldn’t see her as a mom at all. That’s what people always used to tell me before they grew that virtue called tact.
>When I was in college, a fellow student caught a lot of flak for saying she mainly wanted to be a mom — as if that was a bad thing somehow. Everyone has choices, and I always found it unfortunate that people looked down on her choice. Somehow too many people have decided that being a mom is less important than having a career. Sad.
>Well, truth be known, I was voted by some of my friends in college as most likely to “end up in Hollywood on drugs, never to have a stable relationship, boy are all of us so much smarter and more reliable than her” and somehow I’m the one who ended up married for 16 years, with a stable career … you know the 2.5 kids, station wagon with the wood on the side, golden retriever lifestyle…and not ONE of those “oh we’re so much more grounded than you” girls ended up with HALF of that! And just because you are nuturing doesn’t mean you have to sell off that part of your soul to be successful! It doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn what your peers think, it just matters what you do that works for you :o)
>Now you know I think sahms are the bomb…but something about this story makes me want to throttle that teacher. What are they doing asking kids about being mommies anyway? Call me crazy, but kids should not be thinking about having kids.
>Yeah, at 16 I wouldn’t have been horrified if someone said I was destined to be a SAHM and that I was “nurturing.” That’s pretty much the last thing I wanted to be seen as at that point in my life. Then again, I was in an all-girl band then with pink hair and into punk rock, and those things just didn’t scream “nurturing.”
>If someone had used the word “nurturing and SAHM” to describe me as a 16 year old child, I probably would have hunted them down and shoved them into the nearest open locker.Being a mom would have interfered with my plans for global domination.However, the hubs beautiful blue eyes and silver tongue tossed that plan aside when he got me knocked up at 20. And now, I only pray someone will call me nuturing and a good SAHM.Especially to the adoption people. They like those kind of words.
>oops, my comment should have raed “would” have been horrified.
>READ. I give up.
>Just exactly what is they are teaching at your step-daughters school? I object to the whole exercise – not just the teacher’s enigmatic answer. What was this supposed to prove? How was it designed to enlighten or broaden perspective? It seems obvious from your information that SAHM’s are looked upon pejoratively within your step-daughter’s peer group. One would think the teacher would have taken the opportunity to teach about home management or child rearing – if that’s even allowed in these ‘no child left behind’ (unless it means less money for the school) days.